Friday, December 5, 2014

K2pdfopt settings for converting PDF for reading on mobile phone

K2pdfopt is a great software to reformat PDFs for better readability on small-screen devices. Originally built for reading PDFs on Amazon Kindle, it can be used to make PDFs for other small screens such as mobile phones. There is lot of settings that you can tinker with; I document important ones I use to generate PDFs to read on my Xiaomi Mi 3; a 441 PPI, 5 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution phone.

Margins in K2pdfopt. It is good to have some margins to make the content look right. But for some documents it is better to turn them off, experimentation is they key.

the margins can be set by -om option:

-om N        sets right, left, top and bottom margins to N (in inches)

-om[*] N    where * is either [l]eft, [r]ight, [t]op and [b]ottom
A margin of .18 (right), .13 (left), and .099 (top and bottom) is what I use currently.

Here are other main command line switches that I use:
-wrap-        Do not reflow of text
-odpi N       DPI of reading device. I just use the PPI of my phone, but DPI ≠ PPi
-h N            screen size; height in pixels by default
-w N           width
-n                outputs native PDFs. Turns on (-c) colour also
-col 1           instructs K2pdfopt that only one column in supplied document.
-p N-N        page ranges to process. By default includes all. Useful for testing.

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